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In 1250, King Eric IV of Denmark was murdered while visiting his brother, Abel Valdemarsen. Although Abel was suspected of arranging the killing, he swore that it wasn’t so and became king himself. Less than two years later, when he set out to attack some peasants who weren’t paying taxes, he himself was killed by a wheelwright. He was initially buried at the cathedral. But monks there complained that the slain king was walking around at night, frightening them with strange sounds. The royal corpse was removed from the church and sunk in a bog, and a stake was run through its chest.

In “Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World,” John Blair, a professor emeritus of medieval history and archeology at the University of Oxford, examines the many historical accounts of such corpse-killings, in which the already dead, perceived to be causing trouble, are “killed” again. Today, we typically associate such quests with the figure of the vampire—an archetype that in popular culture lives mostly in fiction, such as Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” But fear of the difficult dead neither originated in nor has been confined to the nineteenth-century European re-imaginings of Vlad the Impaler. In what at times reads like the script of a Sam Raimi film that I don’t quite want to watch, Blair writes of corpses that have been posthumously beheaded, or doused in boiling vinegar; of corpses with their death shrouds stuffed in their mouths or nailed down into their coffins; of staked hearts, removed jawbones, and legs twisted back and bound. These attempts to keep down the unquiet dead were, besides being desecrations, exercises in a lot of heavy and often forbidden labor done on decaying bodies.

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Imagining the depth of belief and the extremes of emotion that would motivate such difficult work puts one in touch with sense-making from the past. The cases in Blair’s book, however gruesome, catalogue methods that our species has used to manage terror, sorrow, and disbelief in the face of the irremediable and unpredictable arrival of death. The deceased individuals who were subjected to corpse-killing were not always once powerful and malevolent, like King Abel. Nor was the distress they caused limited to being doomed, as the ghost of Hamlet’s father says, to walk the night. Women who died in childbirth, young men who died in war, infants who died before baptism—these especially pitiable dead were sometimes thought to become terrors whom the living would need to finish off once and for all. Dead husbands and wives returned to seduce former spouses. People whose lives were cut short by plague or tuberculosis returned to bring the same illness upon their family members. The trouble that these dead were seen to cause sometimes corresponded to the suffering that they themselves experienced, and the remedies reveal something of the psychology of those who employed them. A wicked tenth-century judge who, in death, was seen walking around ultimately had his corpse exhumed, sealed in calfskin, and sunk in a lake, perhaps because the living needed convincing that such a cruel man no longer ruled over them.

In some cases, efforts to keep the dead from returning were relatively civil, maybe because the problems they caused, in life and in death, were not seen as so bad, or because their neighbors or leaders argued for restraint. Disparate responses can be seen even in nearby regions around the same time. In Roxburghshire, Scotland, in the twelfth century, a departed and “dissolute chaplain” who merely wandered around groaning was axed and burned, but in Buckinghamshire, England, a bishop dealt with a man who had got up from his grave and visited his wife by posthumously granting him absolution.

Sometimes people dictated their own punishment, detailing what should be done after they were dead. Some Morlachs—a group who lived in Dalmatia—were so worried about becoming walking dead that they asked their families to treat them in death as they would a vampire, a medieval variation on the advance directive. The thinking was that this would prevent them from returning with a thirst for the blood of their own children.

Among the more moving cases that Blair describes are those of people who in life were vulnerable and powerless but in death were considered formidable threats. In the ninth century, a severely disabled woman was buried, her feet bound, in an annex of the church in Elsau, outside Zürich. A year or more later, she was exhumed. Her skull was pulled off and turned sideways, boulders were piled atop her, and a mortar floor covered the grave she was returned to, leaving no indication of what lay below. What thinking could account for such extreme behavior? Though such cases were often distant in time and space, and cannot be summarily considered all together, they share the fact that the minds involved were human.

Slavic folklore about vampires suggests one partial answer to the especial fear of the vulnerable. The undead of these stories are often described as ugly, short, ruddy-complexioned, and dressed in rags; they look like beggars—completely unlike the refined Count Dracula. These earlier vampires appeared at your doorstep at night asking for aid. If one could believe that the needy person at the door was, in fact, a malicious spirit, then turning them away might not have felt so bad. Still, such solace contains the seeds of its own destruction: as these beliefs tip over, bit by bit, into the realm of superstition, it becomes possible to see how it’s only spooky tales that make us misperceive a pitiable person as an otherworldly danger. Stories may influence how we think, but they also present themselves as mere stories.

The Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel, a sophisticated aristocrat, remains, like his forebears, an unwelcome stranger. He is an immigrant living in England who can’t survive without soil from his home country. He is accustomed to hard work, more so than some of his British victims; in his own castle, Dracula does the work of a butler, maid, coachman, and cook. But he is also a fictional character, a fiction maybe powerful enough to preclude any drive to act out such fears in real life.

Even hundreds of years ago, there were people who didn’t believe in the anxious accounts of what the dead were doing. They viewed corpse-killings as a crime, or at least as something to be discouraged. One Lutheran pastor, in a sermon at the grave of a plague victim in the sixteenth century, spoke directly to the issue, addressing the superstition of the time that there were dead women who, through “lip-smacking”—chewing motions made by corpses, which were likely the reason behind practices of removing jawbones or stuffing mouths with fabric—continued to harm the living:

As deaths have increased daily and risen to a peak, this worthy Christian matron now in our thoughts has come, through fruitless gossip, under a suspicion: that she is one of those female persons who lip-smack in the grave . . . and that as long as the lip-smacking continues, the mortality will grow worse and worse. And if we were to follow what has happened elsewhere, these people would have to be dug up, the veils and shrouds that they have eaten (I can’t think how) torn out, and their necks cut with a grave-spade, as has happened in places that I don’t want to name.

He goes on to say that to behead a corpse is to follow the path of Satan, and that it is God, not a lip-smacking corpse, who holds power over life and death. But the pastor seems to know that merely forbidding corpse-killing is not enough to stop it. The superstitious beliefs need to be undermined, to have their error made clear. Another Lutheran pastor explained to his parishioners how it was that they were being led to superstitious, destructive beliefs. It had to do with how the Devil hates women. The pastor explained that the Devil slanders and demeans these women by spreading the belief in lip-smacking, and that the Devil uses these beliefs to breed conflict in the community, “for it embitters and corrodes an honest friendship to dig up someone’s relative and cut off their head.” The pastor had another point, too: digging up the bodies of plague victims would spread the disease, also to the Devil’s delight.

These ways of dealing with the passed (and the past) can seem alien from the perch of the present. But contemporary society, too, abounds in questionable diagnoses of societal ills and unethical, ineffective, or dangerous proposed remedies. The demonization of immigrants in the U.S., for example, follows from false arguments that they are the primary perpetrators of violent crime. Autism, pandemics, school shootings, child abuse—all these problems are responded to by some in ways that differ only minimally from understanding illness as following from the lip-smacking of dead women. “Killing the Dead” is an archeological and anthropological study, but it is also a catalogue of how our predecessors wrestled with the problem of evil: Where do diseases come from, why do children die, why do villains rise to power?

Blair considers some more modern reports, including a few from the twentieth century. In a case from 1914 near the Polish border with Belarus, a priest ordered an exhumation of a corpse found to be face down with its fingers “all bitten as if he had been ‘eating himself.’ ” The priest prayed while the corpse’s head was cut off with a spade. “Thereafter, war, revolution, and collectivization devastated folk-culture,” Blair writes. Belief in corpses that return to bother the living mostly fell away, though a few practices remained: in 2007, a stake was driven through the grave of Slobodan Milošević, the former Serbian President.

After reading Blair’s book, I found the varied ways of killing the dead less like unsettling desecrations and more like emotionally recognizable mourning. Death, fear, and sorrow unify the disparate practices. In two essays published in 1915 as a book, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Sigmund Freud argued that the First World War was bringing about a shift in how Europeans thought about death. Of the beforetime, he writes, “To anyone who listened to us we were of course prepared to maintain that death was the necessary outcome of life, that everyone owes nature a death.” But this was a surface conviction. “In reality, however, we were accustomed to behave as if it were otherwise.” When a death does occur, “ it is as though we were badly shaken in our expectations.” The war, he argued, had made death undeniable: we “are forced to believe in it.” Since war—and death—will continue, he asks if something might be gained by letting go of our illusions, if this might make us as connected to life as to the idea of the imagined soldier returning home safely. Invoking the saying that to preserve peace, arm for war, he concludes, “If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death.” ♦

For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Brady Brickner-Wood is filling in for Kyle Chayka.

Late last year, the White House’s social-media team lauded ICE’s torrential deportation efforts with a string of memes seemingly engineered to go viral. In one video posted to Instagram, the song “all-american bitch,” by Olivia Rodrigo, provides a soundtrack to a montage of deportees being forced onto buses and planes; in another, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Juno” plays as ICE agents accost people in the streets, the lyric “Have you ever tried this one?” repeating each time a new person is detained. Another video uses the satirical song “Big Boys,” from a “Saturday Night Live” skit featuring SZA, as agents handcuff people in parking lots. A line from the song—“It’s cuffing season”—flashes in all caps across the screen. Rodrigo, Carpenter, and SZA have denounced the videos as “hateful,” “evil,” and “peak dark,” respectively. (In response to Carpenter, the White House doctored a video promoting her own “S.N.L.” appearance to make it seem as if she said she would “arrest” the cast member Marcello Hernández for being “too illegal.”) Unlike other cases of Trump using musicians’ songs, against their will, at rallies or in campaign materials—Beyoncé, Adele, and Jack White, among them—these videos are not one-off inanities or easily ignorable promotional assets. Instead, they are part of a hundred-million-dollar “wartime recruitment” effort, according to an internal document obtained by the Washington Post, aimed at hiring thousands more deportation officers in the new year, a propaganda crusade intended to portray ICE as a team of Avengers valiantly defending American soil from a malevolent foreign terror. By splicing pop songs and familiar meme formats into cruel detainment footage, ICE strains to attract a younger demographic, hoping to convince them that the agency is a vibrant—and trollishly funny—organization engaged in the noble work of putting away bad guys. Oh, the pop stars got mad? Joke’s on them. Now even more people know ICE is hiring.

The Trump Administration has pledged to deport a million immigrants each year during the President’s second term—even, it appears, if the immigrants have not committed crimes or are lawfully residing in the U.S. This past summer, as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress increased ICE’s budget to more than a hundred and seventy billion dollars across the next four years, netting out to an annual allocation that is more than the combined yearly budgets of all local and state law-enforcement agencies in the country. ICE has used some of this money to go on a hiring spree; the agency recently announced that it had signed up twelve thousand new officers and agents—a hundred-and-twenty-per-cent increase to the agency’s workforce.

Some of these new ICE agents may have been lured in by the ads running on national television, or by the promotional content appearing on social-media sites and streaming services. On platforms such as Hulu, HBO Max, Snapchat, Spotify, and YouTube, pre-roll and automated ads have begun popping up with alarming frequency. “Join the mission to protect America,” a narrator says, in one recent ad that appeared on Spotify. In another ad specifically targeting local law-enforcement officers in Chicago, an apocalyptic vision of America is reinforced: “You took an oath to protect and serve, to keep your family, your city, safe. But in sanctuary cities, you’re ordered to stand down while dangerous illegals walk free.” According to the internal document obtained by the Post, ICE hopes to target prospective hires through location-based marketing tactics like geofencing, a technology that allows them to send ads to the phones of people in specific locations, such as college campuses, gun and trade shows, military bases, and Nascar races. They’ve also allotted funds for right-wing influencers and streamers to promote ICE hiring efforts, and flooded official Department of Homeland Security and ICE social-media feeds with memes. “Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?” one graphic posted to X and Instagram reads; another image shows a classic car parked on a beach with the header “America After 100 Million Deportations.”

The U.S. government has, of course, never been shy about its spending on defense advertising. In 2023, the Department of Defense’s total advertising budget was $1.1 billion, with the bulk of the funds being directed to military-recruitment efforts; in 2025, the Army’s advertising budget alone surpassed a billion dollars. Still, what makes the D.H.S.’s spending on ICE advertising so disorienting is not only how the agency is being branded as another branch of the military—a domestic war organization hellbent on eradicating a rival militant force—but how it has weaponized social media and digital culture against itself, a somewhat novel strategy for a governmental department. Traditional military calls to action, sometimes combined with white-supremacist tropes, are being deployed in the many memes and A.I.-generated images that the D.H.S. and the White House post daily to TikTok, X, and Instagram, such as Uncle Sam beckoning prospective recruits to save the country, or a nineteenth-century Manifest Destiny painting captioned with the slogan “A Heritage to Be Proud Of, a Homeland Worth Defending.” Anxieties about the border are hardly new, but they have been embellished to dangerous, deranged degrees during Trump’s second term. To declare war on immigrants, many of whom are fleeing persecution and violence fomented by past American interventionism, requires a powerful, blinding narrative strong enough to smokescreen the degradation and dehumanization at the core of the messaging. “The light will defeat the dark,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff, declared at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, in September. “We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened.” Protect the homeland. Remove the invaders. Destroy the aliens. The dog whistles have turned into fire alarms.

Trump’s time in office has obliterated the pretense that there’s any meaningful separation between the state and corporate interests. The decisions and forces that affect society, that dictate the livelihoods and well-being of its citizens, are at the mercy of the market, and the now frighteningly transparent ways that the market serves and benefits its dutiful governmental benefactors. Trump, conflating his politics with capitalist preponderance, has realized that to further his political and economic power, he must activate the state’s most powerful asset: the War Department. Threatening to occupy Greenland. Overthrowing the Venezuelan government and laying claim to its oil reserves. And, crucially, deploying the National Guard into U.S. cities, declaring a domestic war against a fabricated enemy: those who have altered the imagined portrait of the American pastoral.

When defenders of the Trump Administration’s immigration policies cite the possibility of legal immigration, they, too, are perpetuating the reality that market supremacy has usurped legislative processes. For working-class and poor people in developing countries, there are limited options to attaining legal status in the U.S. But if a person seeking status is already wealthy or attains corporate sponsorship, for instance, a viable pathway to citizenship opens up, even if only slightly. This prioritization of wealth is no better articulated than in the launch of Trump’s “gold card,” a literal card with Trump’s face on it that, for a million dollars, grants a foreign-born purchaser a visa and a fast track to citizenship. These are the people the Administration believes deserve entry into the country; most anyone else, apparently, is deemed an enemy of the state. ICE’s “wartime recruitment” ads also, paradoxically, prey on those who are struggling to find a way to survive within the bottlenecked economy, people for whom the stable annual salary provided by a job with ICE, and a fifty-thousand-dollar signing bonus, would surely improve their quality of life. The agency also promises a path toward meaning, a heroic call to “fulfill your mission.” The fantasy of fulfillment, the dream of belonging—something the so-called enemy is plenty familiar with. ♦

El Helicoide, a brutalist complex sitting atop a hill in central Caracas, is known as one of Latin America’s most notorious detention centers. Built as a shopping mall in the nineteen-fifties, the structure was taken over by Venezuela’s national-intelligence services, who turned its abandoned storefronts and lavatories into makeshift prison cells.

Early on Saturday afternoon, hours after American forces captured Nicolás Maduro, Amanda Monasterios sped off to El Helicoide. Her son, Jesús Armas, a prominent opposition leader, was among the political prisoners held inside. Monasterios, who is seventy-four, looked out at the capital’s eerily deserted streets: caraqueños had awakened to a bombed city, where people had been called on to begin la lucha armada. She arrived at El Helicoide to find that armed men had sealed off the premises. Patrol cars guarded the entrance—and there was no way to get near the prison. “It was as if the entire national police were guarding the approaches,” she said.

Her son had been in detention for just over a year, during which time Monasterios had been allowed to see him only occasionally. Clutching a bag of homemade food, she was prepared to step out of her car and seek a way into El Helicoide, but a companion advised her against it. “Don’t do it,” the person implored her. “We’ll come back on Wednesday.”

An engineer by training, Armas made a foray into politics as a student and was later elected a councilman in Caracas. He worked to address the city’s crumbling infrastructure, but it was his work in the general election of 2024 that drew the regime’s attention. After officials barred María Corina Machado, the opposition leader, from entering the race, she anointed a retired diplomat named Edmundo González to run in her place. Armas helped lead González’s campaign in the capital.

The election was mired in fraud: Armas, along with others, rallied hundreds of volunteers to observe the vote and preserve printed tallies from every voting machine. When polls closed, Maduro rushed to claim victory—a claim the opposition forcefully disputed, showing proof that González had won in a landslide. The regime never released a full count of the vote. Instead, officials engaged in a vicious crusade to repress whoever dared challenge the outcome.

On the morning of December 10, 2024, Armas was abducted from a cafeteria in eastern Caracas. It took almost a week—and a sustained public campaign—for him to be tracked down. Saimar Rivas, Armas’s partner and a longtime civil-rights activist, told me that he had been taken to a clandestine site run by the SEBIN, Venezuela’s intelligence agency. “There, he was tortured, asphyxiated with plastic bags, and questioned about the whereabouts of Edmundo, María Corina, and other opposition leaders,” Rivas said. “They offered him to become an informant, but he refused.”

What followed was a ten-month period of isolation at El Helicoide, where Armas was barred from any visits. He became one of about two thousand Venezuelans detained in the election’s aftermath; many of them remain behind bars to this day. “Every single leader who was involved in the election is either in detention, living in exile, or hiding,” Rivas said.

From the beginning, Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Maduro raised numerous questions about the fate of Venezuela’s political prisoners. Inside detention centers, rumors spread that an American intervention would trigger a killing spree. Family members worried that their relatives could be held hostage or disappeared by the regime. “I haven’t slept in a year,” Monasterios said. Stories abounded of prisoners gone missing and of relatives who never got to see their loved ones again. Now, people worried that detainees could be used as human shields.

Trump’s silence on the subject had only raised more doubts. In public, the President had seldom mentioned political prisoners. His rhetoric around Venezuela had focussed almost entirely on the country’s oil resources and on what the U.S. stood to gain. In the eyes of many Venezuelans, his endorsement of Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s second-in-command, was proof of his disregard for Venezuela’s democracy. “The fact that Delcy has been sworn in as President is, in itself, a flagrant violation of our sovereignty,” Rivas said. “And to do so under an American tutelage is to double down on that violation.”

Rodríguez, she went on, embodied the state’s repressive force. “At the end of the day, she is a continuity of that regime—a person who looked on as crimes against humanity were committed,” Rivas said. A number of political analysts have argued that keeping Rodríguez in power was necessary to prevent an implosion in Venezuela. Whether that holds true will depend on her political overtures. Gerardo Munck, a political scientist at the University of Southern California, noted that the release of political prisoners was a first step. “It’s a concession,” he said. “A sign of respect for civil liberties.”

Until now, the regime had shown no such signs. Immediately after Rodríguez took the oath of office, her government issued a decree ordering police forces to go after “any person involved in the promotion or support of the United States’ armed attack”—an order that could arbitrarily be used to persecute civilians and quell dissent. At the National Assembly that day, more than a dozen journalists were detained while covering Rodríguez’s swearing-in. Though the journalists were released within hours, the National Press Workers’ Union issued a poignant statement denouncing the fact that twenty-three of their members were still behind bars, and that censorship remained prevalent in Venezuela.

Trump has insisted that Rodríguez must play by the United States’ rules. In a press conference following Maduro’s capture, he boasted that the new leader was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.” Days later, he referred in passing to a “torture chamber in the middle of Caracas that they’re closing up,” without offering any specifics. It remains unclear whether the release of political prisoners is among the Trump Administration’s conditions. But to Rivas—and to many family members of detainees—it is an imperative need. “Only then will it become clear that we are headed toward a transition where individual freedoms can be respected,” she said. “Until such time, the dictatorship in Venezuela will be left intact.” ♦

On Friday night, when Donald Trump met with a small group of senior Administration officials and decided to authorize a raid in Caracas by Delta Force commandos to capture Nicolás Maduro, those present included Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Secretary of War Pete Hegseth; the C.I.A. director, John Ratcliffe; Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Stephen Miller, the President’s most essential policy adviser, omni-portfolio’d and grimly saturnine. Notably absent was the Vice-President, J. D. Vance. On Saturday, when the same group announced at Mar-a-Lago that the attack had been a success, Vance wasn’t there, either. A detailed report from the Wall Street Journal on the months of planning leading up to the attack did not mention the Vice-President’s name once.

Vance’s exclusion may have owed something to ideology. The Vice-President, who served in Iraq, has been one of the loudest critics of American interventionism in the second Trump Administration, both before entering the White House and since. (Last spring, when The Atlantic published Signal chats of the planning for a bombing attack in Yemen, the messages showed Vance striking a few cautionary notes.) That may have explained why he was missing—he’d lost out to the hawks. But Vance is also the ablest communicator in the President’s orbit, and so his absence has been especially notable in the confusing and various answers the Administration has given to the most basic questions about the act of war: What was the attack really about, and what does the President intend to happen next in Venezuela?

This past weekend, when Vance did eventually make his case for the attack, in a long post on X, he sounded faintly lawyerly and quietly anguished. Maduro’s Venezuela, he argued, was a source of drugs—if not fentanyl, which has been the scourge of Vance’s beloved Midwest for the past decade, then certainly cocaine—and “a profit center for all of the Latin American cartels.” Vance acknowledged that there was “a lot of criticism about oil,” alluding to concerns that the U.S. was effectively using its might to steal Venezuela’s significant reserves, without even the pretense of principle. Twenty years ago, Vance went on, under a prior regime, “Venezuela expropriated American oil property and until recently used that stolen property to get rich and fund their narcoterroristic activities.” (Note the legalistic “until recently.”) Vance continued, “I understand the anxiety over the use of military force, but are we just supposed to allow a communist to steal our stuff in our hemisphere and do nothing?” The Vice-President seemed pained, like someone was twisting his arm. His statement also didn’t add up to a case for war, or anything like it.

The attack on Venezuela and the capture of its President, the most consequential foreign-policy act of this Administration, has been impeccably planned and woefully undertheorized. “The lack of framing of the message on a potential occupation has the base bewildered, if not angry,” Trump’s longtime ally Steve Bannon told the Times. In the days since the raid, the White House has offered a mess of contradictory plans and rationales. On Saturday, Trump said that the United States would now “run” Venezuela. But Trump officials had not kept any troops in the country and left Maduro’s Vice-President, Delcy Rodríguez, in charge; she was soon trying to rally her countrymen against Washington. Then, on Sunday morning, Rubio offered a clarification—the American role would be limited to continuing to enforce an oil “quarantine,” effectively a naval blockade, as a lever to encourage friendlier policies from Caracas. But that blockade had been in place before Maduro’s capture, and it didn’t resemble anything like a plan to “run” the country.

In this vacuum of meaning, the key Administration personalities have taken to network television and social media, offering their own post-facto theories of the case. They have been like the sweepers in curling, trying to coax a runaway stone onto an advantageous track. The runaway stone, in this case, being Trump’s decision to attack, and everything that will come after.

Among Trump’s advisers, Rubio’s vision is the clearest. His intent is anti-Communist. Cuban officials, Rubio told NBC, “are the ones that were propping up Maduro. His entire, like, internal security force, his internal security apparatus is entirely controlled by Cubans.” The previous day, at Mar-a-Lago, Rubio had said, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.” Was that a war plan for Havana? If so, the President didn’t exactly sound persuaded. On Sunday night, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that, when it came to Cuba, “I don’t think we need any action,” because the country was already “ready to fall.” Trump also made some critical comments about the Presidents of Colombia (“a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States”) and Mexico (“has to get their act together”), which suggested that his gaze might be less methodically trained on the region’s Communist regimes.

Stephen Miller, meanwhile, indulged a grander historical view, of a renewed imperial program. “Not long after World War II the West dissolved its empires and colonies and began sending colossal sums of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories,” he wrote on social media. “The West opened its borders, a kind of reverse colonization, providing welfare and thus remittances, while extending to those newcomers and their families not only the full franchise but preferential legal and financial treatment over the native citizenry. The neoliberal experiment, at its core, has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world.” Speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN on Monday, he declared that the U.S. could seize Greenland if it wanted. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Are the President’s intentions actually colonial, or more simply a hostage-taking kind of gunboat diplomacy? According to the Financial Times, the brother of Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim leader, had held talks last year with officials in Washington, a detail which offered a whiff of Cold War client-statism and raised the question of what Rodríguez might have promised them. Trump himself kept talking not about anti-Communism or narco-trafficking but about oil. On Air Force One, he said that “oil companies are going to go in and rebuild this system.” (The companies themselves said that they hadn’t been consulted; flooding the market with new supply would not be in the interests of corporate profits.) The President told the public that the rebuilding of Venezuela’s oil industry would take “billions” in infrastructure investment—in Venezuela, not the U.S. Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative, observed, “Democratic talking points writing themselves right now.”

Vance’s general absence from the Venezuela initiative has been taken as an expression of his ideological identity. He is a dove, at least in the relative terms of Trumpworld, and this has been an operation for the hawks. But his more salient position may be as Trump’s political heir, and the Venezuela adventure is beginning to look like a very hard political sell. A CBS/YouGov poll taken before the attack found that seventy per cent of Americans opposed military action in Venezuela; a snap poll taken by YouGov just after Maduro’s capture showed that only thirty-six per cent of respondents “strongly or somewhat” supported the operation. If Trump means to persuade the American people of the wisdom of the attack by trying to bring them cheaper Venezuelan oil, then that will mean a far deeper entanglement in a conflict that he might prefer to treat as a hit-and-run. And then there’s the tricky international question of why, exactly, the U.S. is entitled to just take oil reserves off of Caracas in the first place. Rubio may have achieved a long-standing anti-Communist goal. Miller can celebrate a blow struck against the liberal order. But the likeliest person to inherit the Trump mantle was the one staying out of the frame. Vance had noted that there is a national anxiety “over the use of military force.” Grant that there is a moral dimension to that anxiety. There is also a political one. ♦

Depending on whom you ask, Nicolás Maduro is either the President, the former President, or the President turned dictator of Venezuela. In an indictment unsealed over the weekend, the Trump Administration calls him “the de facto but illegitimate ruler of the country.” But, in a Manhattan courtroom, on Monday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein wasn’t interested in Maduro’s title, formal or otherwise. He only asked what judges routinely ask federal defendants during their first appearances before a magistrate, right before they’re arraigned on criminal charges. “Are you, sir, Nicolás Maduro Moros?” the judge asked.

That’s when Maduro—dressed in navy, and wearing shackles and headphones, so that he could hear the court interpreter—stood up and, in his native Spanish, told the judge who he was and how he’d arrived inside a United States courtroom. “Soy el Presidente constitucional de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela,” Maduro responded, before explaining that the U.S. government had kidnapped him and his wife from their home in Caracas on January 3rd, and that he was invoking the protections of international treaties. “I consider myself a prisoner of war,” he said.

Judge Hellerstein interrupted Maduro and reminded him that he had asked a simple yes-or-no question. “I only want to know one thing: Are you Nicolás Maduro Moros?”

“I am Nicolás Maduro Moros,” the defendant confirmed. During her own allocution moments later, Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, likewise struck a note of defiance and introduced herself as the First Lady of Venezuela, her face appearing bruised and bandaged. (Later in the hearing, her lawyer indicated that she may have suffered a fracture or severe bruising to her ribs during her arrest.)

That was only the start of a simultaneously dramatic yet profoundly quotidian hearing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, a venue long renowned for proceedings against corrupt politicians, Mafia figures, drug kingpins, and even former heads of state—such as Honduras’s Juan Orlando Hernández, who after his extradition, in 2022, was indicted, convicted, and imprisoned on federal drug-trafficking and weapons charges not unlike the ones Maduro faces. (On the week of Thanksgiving, President Donald Trump pardoned Hernández, just days after pardoning a turkey.) The Daniel Patrick Moynihan Courthouse, together with the neighboring Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, which houses the federal appeals court, has been the battleground for numerous Trump-era legal controversies across his two Presidencies. Steve Bannon, Michael Cohen, Stormy Daniels, E. Jean Carroll, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Eric Adams are among the figures in the President’s orbit who have sought, faced, or eluded justice, in one way or another, in these marbled halls.

Trump wasn’t a subject of the hearing on Monday, yet it was impossible to take in the spectacle of Maduro denouncing the charges against him, in open court, without considering that, for much of the past year, his beleaguered nation has been a fixation of the Administration, more so than any other country in Latin America. From the hundreds of Venezuelans unlawfully disappeared to El Salvador, under the Alien Enemies Act, to the elimination of Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans, to the lawless strikes against Venezuelan boats suspected of carrying drugs, Trump has continuously made the South American country a target of his fury, his policies, and a not-so-secret desire for regime change and its vast oil reserves. Hellerstein is well aware of this relentless campaign, having ruled in May that the American President could not invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law, to summarily deport Venezuelan migrants, because there was no war, invasion, or predatory incursion by or against Venezuela that justified its use. (The judge is also familiar with Trump’s thirty-four-count indictment in New York, over hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, which Trump tried to push to federal court—a bid that Hellerstein denied.)

Neither geopolitics nor the broader constitutional and international-law implications of Maduro’s arrest and prosecution were a focus of Monday’s proceedings, but Hellerstein did inform Maduro, during his initial protest, that he’d have an opportunity to bring up those big-picture arguments ahead of trial. His lawyer, Barry Pollack, who once represented the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, later made reference to the expected pretrial motions seeking to quash the indictment—characterizing them as “substantial”—including one related to the question of whether Maduro enjoys head-of-state immunity. This thorny and contested issue, among others, may well reach the Supreme Court, which, like Hellerstein, has already reminded Trump twice not to play fast and loose with the due process owed to Venezuelans accused of being alien enemies.

During Maduro’s first appearance, what truly mattered, for everyone involved, was informing him of the charges against him, which include narco-terrorism, cocaine-importation, and weapons-conspiracy offenses that harmed the interests of the United States. “I have it in my hands for the first time,” Maduro said, of the charging document, and he opted to waive his right to have it read into the court’s record. “I’d rather read it personally,” he added. When Hellerstein informed him of his constitutional rights to remain silent, and to legal counsel, among other protections, Maduro seemed to marvel at the idea that he had any rights at all. “I did not know these rights as you have informed them to me,” he said.

By forcibly bringing Maduro and his wife into the jurisdiction of the federal courts, the Trump Administration will now have to accept, if only tacitly, that at least two Venezuelans deserve the basic human right to be heard before the government attempts to take their life or liberty—something Judge James Boasberg, in Washington, concluded was not given to the hundred and thirty-seven Venezuelan men whom the White House sent to a brutal prison in a nation not their own. Or to the people murdered in the Caribbean under the pretense that mere suspicion of drug trafficking is enough to subject them to an act of war.

For all his unfamiliarity with U.S. criminal procedure, Maduro did seem keenly aware that his future may well hinge on his declaration at the outset of the arraignment that he remains the rightful President of Venezuela. At the crux of the hearing, when Hellerstein asked him how he pleaded, Maduro again veered off script. Rather than the usual “not guilty,” Maduro said, “Soy inocente. No soy culpable. Soy un hombre decente. Presidente constitucional de mi país,” which his interpreter rendered as: “I’m innocent. I’m not guilty. I’m a decent man,” and “still the President of my country.” Maduro’s wife, who also stands accused of drugs and weapons charges, also pleaded not guilty, and declared herself “completely innocent.”

Now comes the hard part of waiting for a trial that is not expected to happen for a very long time; in Hernández’s case, the lapse between his indictment and trial took roughly two years. Hellerstein scheduled a follow-up hearing for March, but Pollack noted he expects that the evidence the prosecution is now required to turn over to the defense will be “voluminous and complicated”—as if to suggest that he may seek to challenge the Trump Administration’s case on a number of fronts, as soon as he learns what the U.S. government has amassed on his client. Hellerstein, who is ninety-two, and a veteran of the federal bench, said his goal is to insure that Maduro gets a fair trial: “That’s my job, and that’s my intent.” ♦